18 Kids and Counting

The Duggars are what is wrong with middle America.And they just keep breeding.

The Duggars aren't teaching their children much about sex or relationships. And their first son just married a girl he doesn't know very well. Can you say sexual deprivation?

They've shielded their kids from reality for so long that they don't have a concept of normality. Normal for them is eighteen children and Wal-Mart shopping trips. Normal, for the Duggars, is dressing their daughters in long skirts and teaching them to cook and clean while the boys run wild. Normal for them is following their 20 year old son out on dates and forbidding him to kiss his fiancée until their wedding day. Normal for them is handing their grown son a book on how to mate with his spouse.

Yes. I know this is America, where you can raise your kids however you damn well please.
But let's be realistic.

The driving idea behind raising your children to be religious is that they will have a built-in moral compass when faced with "evil" forces. Like, I don't know, birth control, or rock music. The idea is to strengthen your kids so that they will not crumble in the face of cable television and internet porn.

What do you really achieve by hiding your kids from the world?

You end up raising lost little lambs who don't understand society. You raise kids that get married as soon as possible to people they barely know, just so that they may have some sexual release. You raise your children to victimize themselves.

Show your kids the world. Make them understand what it is--a place filled with temptation and challenges that can be overcome without fear. Show them that the world is vast and diverse, and that not everything different is dangerous.

Here are a few of my other reasons for disliking the Duggar parents:

-18 children leave one hell of an ecological footprint. Maybe right now they are living in a mildly green manner, but each one of those kids will grow up and use fossil fuels, water, and landfill space. Worse, they've been raised with a "be fruitful and multiply like it's a hobby" mindset, so they will each probably have a ton of kids. Do you see the cycle?

-The Duggars *admittedly* use a "buddy system" in which each older child is assigned a younger child to care for. Do you see what this really is? With 18 kids, it's not just the occasional diaper change or bottle-feeding, it's a 24 hour a day parenting job being handed to a 12 or 13 year old girl. Who takes care of the babies while Michelle is teaching homeschool and Jim Bob is at work? Are you telling me those infants are placed somewhere quiet so that the older children may learn? Or is there really little actual schooling going on? When your 12 year old daughter is raising *your* child, something is out of whack.

A quote from the show: "At age 11, JoyAnna has changed more dirty diapers than the average father of four."

-Currently, thousands of adoptable children sit in foster care. Most will remain there until the age of 18, after which they will be thrust into society with little preparation. I know this because I have seen it. I work with the tragic results of the foster system every day. The Duggars could have adopted three foster children and saved them years of pain and struggle, instead they chose to breed like hamsters and bring 18 more children into the world.

I dislike these two people because they show no real loyalty to the planet or even the human race. They breed. They consume. At the end of the day, they are treated as heroes for what really amounts to pigheaded self-worship. Sure, they have no debt, and those babies are awful pretty, but the rest of us will pay the consequences for the Duggar family's shortsightedness for hundreds of years.